‘We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are’: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future

Abstract

Archival appraisal has its own history and is highly contested ground within the profession, and increasingly with our external communities. This article analyses the evolution of appraisal thinking through three well-established phases: the curatorial guardian assigning appraisal responsibility to the creator or administrator of records; the historian-archivist making appraisal decisions indirectly through the filter of trends in academic History; and the archivist as expert directly assessing contexts of function and activity to discern appraisal value. A fourth phase is now beckoning: participatory appraisal with various communities of citizens so that silences long haunting our archives may at last be heard.

Notes

This article is a reworking of the opening keynote address that I presented to the Annual Conference of The Society of Archivists (UK), in Manchester, England, on 1 September 2010, during which conference the Society became the Archives and Records Association (UK). I wish to thank Katy Goodrum, then the Society's chair, and Justin Cavernelis-Frost, Conference Committee chair, for honoring me with this invitation to be the keynote speaker and for their many attendant kindnesses. I am grateful to Caroline Williams for her patient encouragement of my developing this present essay and to the peer reviewers for their perceptive comments.

Other archival writers have suggested such ying-and-yang formulations in shaping the archival mindset: on acquisition as a reflection of archival identity especially, see the case study of American–Jewish archives by Elisabeth Kaplan, ‘We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity,’ American Archivist 63.1 (Spring/Summer 2000); and on transforming from a positivist to a postmodern identity for one medium of recording, see Joan M. Schwartz, ‘“We make our tools and our tools make us’: Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics, and Poetics of Diplomatics,” Archivaria 40 (Fall 1995), which feeds off and quotes William J. Mitchell's famous aphorism, from his The Reconfigured Eye. Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, 1992, cited in Schwartz, 40.

Richard J. Cox and Helen W. Samuels, ‘The Archivist's First Responsibility: A Research Agenda to Improve the Identification and Retention of Records of Enduring Value,’ American Archivist 51 (Winter–Spring 1988).

Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago, 2007); or his fine essays updating these ideas, in “Ethics and the Archive: ‘An Incessant Movement of Recontextualisation’,” Terry Cook, ed., Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions. Essays in Honor of Helen Willa Samuels (Chicago, 2011); and ‘Archons, Aliens and Angels: Power and Politics in the Archive,’ in Jennie Hill, ed., The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: A Reader (London, 2011).

On the archivist as vacuum cleaner and the focus before the 1950s (in both the UK and Canada's national archives) on very old records, see Terry Cook, ‘An Archival Revolution: W. Kaye Lamb and the Transformation of the Archival Profession,’ Archivaria 60 (Fall 2005); and more generally on the ideas animating archives in the English-speaking and Western world, Terry Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,’ Archivaria 43 (Spring 1997).

Hilary Jenkinson, A Manual of Archive Administration (London, 1966, a reissue of the revised second edition of 1937), 151 for the quotation, and 136–55 for the discussion. On Jenkinson more generally, and the Dutch Manual that influenced him significantly, see Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue,’ 20–26. Jenkinson's faith in the efficacy of the Administrator to carry out these tasks was significantly compromised in work-place reality even in his own time, in no less than the key agency of his own government responsible for recordkeeping, by such factors as informal conventions, localized practices, social expectations, and cultural norms; see the detailed investigations by Barbara L. Craig, ‘Rethinking Formal Knowledge and its Practices in the Organization: The British Treasury's Registry Between 1900 and 1950,’ Archival Science 2.1–2 (2002).

To get a flavor of such work, merely by archivists, in addition to the essays by Verne Harris cited above in note 4, see Richard Cox and David Wallace, eds., Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport CN and London, 2002); Margaret Procter, Michael G. Cook, and Caroline Williams, eds., Political Pressure and the Archival Record (Chicago, 2006); and Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago, 2009.). There are now hundreds of books and articles by historians and others on the politics of memory through the presence, absence, alteration, or restriction of records; for a mere entrée to this field in the mid-1990s, which has since exploded, see the many citations to such ‘memory’ scholarship in note 3 of Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue.’

Hans Booms, ‘Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage: Issues in the Appraisal of Archival Sources,’ Archivaria 24 (Summer 1987), originally published in German in 1972, based on a 1971 speech (translation by Hermina Joldersma and Richard Klumpenhouwer), 106.

For the most complete overview of macroappraisal, plus citations to earlier and related work and to published case studies, see Terry Cook, ‘Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice: Origins, Characteristics, and Implementation in Canada, 1950–2000,’ Archival Science 5.2–4(2005). For the original statement on the documentation strategy, see Helen Willa Samuels, ‘Who Controls the Past,’ American Archivist 49 (Spring 1986); for an updated appreciation and the continuing (indeed increased) relevance of Samuels' ideas for the digital era, see many of the essays, and the editor's introduction, in Cook, ed., Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions. Essays in Honor of Helen Willa Samuels.

On Schellenberg and the context of his appraisal ideas, see Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue,’ 26–29.

For early American critiques of the failing of the Schellenbergian model in terms of its results, see F. Gerald Ham, ‘The Archival Edge’ (1975), in Maygene F. Daniels and Timothy Walch, eds., A Modern Archives Reader (Washington: National Archives and Records Service, 1984); and Timothy L. Ericson, ‘At the ‘Rim of Creative Dissatisfaction’: Archivists and Acquisition Development,’ Archivaria 33 (Winter 1991–92). For a case study of its failure to reflect even well-established newer trends in historiography even at the National Archives and Records Administration, see Elizabeth Lockwood, ‘‘Imponderable Matters:’ The Influence of New Trends in History on Appraisal at the National Archives,” American Archivist 53 (Summer 1990). On the long-term growing ‘divide’ between archivists and historians, especially on defining the values of records to be acquired by archives that are at the heart of Schellenberg's thinking, see Francis X. Blouin Jr. And William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford, 2011).

Ham, ‘Archival Edge,’ 328–29.

Michael Moss, ‘Opening Pandora's Box: What is an Archives in the Digital Environment,’ in Louise Craven, ed., What Are Archives? Cultural and Theoretical Perspectives: A Reader (Farnham, 2008), 81–83 especially; Terry Cook, ‘Archives, Evidence, and Memory: Thoughts on a Divided Tradition,’ Archival Issues 22 (1997). My ideas are thus not quite so distinctly opposed to his own, as Moss suggests elsewhere in his essay!

Booms, ‘Society and the Formation of a Documentary Heritage,’ 104.

While I have written extensively on macroappraisal, the best analysis of the theoretical and practical/strategic background and operational characteristics of macroappraisal, as well as the fuller context of the next two paragraphs, is in my ‘Macroappraisal in Theory and Practice: Origins, Characteristics, and Implementation in Canada.’

Caroline Williams, ‘Personal Papers: Perceptions and Practices,’ in Craven, ed., What Are Archives? See also Richard J. Cox, Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations (Duluth MN, 2008). Such comprehensiveness as suggested in this paragraph long ago animated Helen Samuels' thinking behind the documentation strategy; for an analysis of her ideas, see note 9 above. On total archives more generally and historically, see Laura Millar's two-part article, ‘Discharging Our Debt: The Evolution of the Total Archives Concept in English Canada,’ Archivaria 46 (Fall 1998); and ‘The Spirit of Total Archives: Seeking a Sustainable Archival System,’ Archivaria 47 (Spring 1999).

On this dimension, see the eloquent analysis by Catherine Hobbs, ‘The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals,’ Archivaria 52 (Fall 2001). For an example of the application of her ideas, in terms of how individuals, in maintaining their personal archives, reflect their inner being, see Jennifer Douglas and Heather MacNeil, ‘Arranging the Self: Literary and Historical Perspectives on Writers' Archives,’ Archivaria 67 (Spring 2009).

Daniel J. Caron and Richard Brown, ‘The Documentary Moment in the Digital Age: Establishing New Value Propositions for Public Memory,’ Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011). This collaborative network is now the formal policy and active program of Library and Archives Canada to research and launch discussions with partners across Canada. On 22 October 2010, the National, Provincial, and Territorial Archivists Conference (NPTAC), representing the major government archives of the country, all with full ‘total archives' mandates to collect government and private records in all media, declared that, ‘the changing face of technology and communications is impacting ‘memory institutions' in how they appraise, acquire, preserve and make accessible the documentary heritage of Canada;’ and that ‘these changes are blurring the traditional boundaries and traditional ways of thinking between libraries, archives, and museums in how we preserve and access information;’ the NPTAC therefore supports ‘the development of a Pan-Canadian strategy, involving the broader heritage community, i.e. libraries, archives and museums, and based on a collaborative or joint partnership model, to sustain our documentary heritage into the future’ and the NPTAC will ‘contribute to establishing a Pan-Canadian Documentary Heritage Network (i.e. working initiatives and projects) prior to the 2017 celebrations of Canada's sesquicentennial.’ Canadian Council of Archives Newsletter 68 (June 2011), item 2, also available online.

See http://www.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/news/article/ariel_dorfman_talks_about_the_intricacies_of_memory_justice_and_reconciliat/ (cited 10 June 2011).

For the mandate, background, roles, processes, and the creation of the archive as the National Resource Centre, see www.trc-cvr.ca/overview, and the various numbered sections (cited 24 June 2011).

See the exciting new book of more than a dozen essays exploring these very themes: Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander, eds., Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory (London, 2009).

See the fine discussion (and summarizing much of his earlier work in this regard) by Andrew Flinn, ‘The Impact of Independent and Community Archives on Professional Archival Thinking and Practice,’ in Jennie Hill, ed., The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: A Reader (London, 2011).

Wendy A. Smith, ‘Archiving Democracy, Democratizing Archives: Rethinking Appraisal and Public Programming for the Digital Age,’ (University of Manitoba, Archival Studies M.A. thesis proposal, 2010).

Eric Ketelaar, ‘Sharing: Collected Memories in Communities of Records,’ Archives and Manuscripts 33.1 (May 2005), 54.

Written by Paul Simon, in February 1964, and performed by Simon and Garfunkel, first released in its original acoustic-guitar ‘folk’ version as part of their first album, Wednesday Morning 3 a.m., in October 1964; the song was then remixed with electric guitars in a ‘folk-rock’ version in September 1965 and released as a single (which reached number one in early 1966) and then appeared on the January 1966 album Sounds of Silence. The song was originally entitled ‘The Sounds of Silence,’ and in later versions ‘The Sound of Silence’; both singular and plural forms appear in the lyrics. Paul Simon © 1964. Reproduced here under fair-use clauses of copyright law for scholarly purposes and for no commercial gain or purpose.

See above, note 19, for the URL to his speech.